Former Board of Education member Kim Coco Iwamoto announced Sunday she is running for lieutenant governor to bring “courageous, compassionate leadership” to the office and “to set a tone of accountability that we are listening to the people.”
The lieutenant governor “does not need to be a silent understudy for the next eight years,” said the 49-year-old retired attorney. “We have this duty to speak out against the injustice. When we remain silent, we are complicit to the injustice.”
Iwamoto joins a field already crowded in part due to Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui’s decision not to run for re-election.
She draws from the story of her mother and her family, who emigrated from Japan and were rounded up by the government from their California home and held in an Arizona internment camp; her own story of discrimination in the 1990s as a transgender woman in the fashion industry in New York; and the bullying faced by her foster children in school.
Iwamoto, prompted by her own experience with discrimination, decided to go to law school and served on the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission from 2012 to 2016.
As a BOE member elected in 2006 and 2010, she supported the rights of students, including the homeless. If elected, she promises to support the underdog and the marginalized and fight for people’s rights by investing in better schools, not bigger prisons, houses for the homeless and tending to natural resources and not multinational corporations.
“Kim Coco is a civil rights hero,” said campaign committee chairman and former state Judge Dan Foley. “If elected, she will transform the Office of Lieutenant Governor into an office of advocacy for people who may not have a voice. She is not about advancing a political career. She is about making a difference now.”
Other contenders are Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa, Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr., state Sen. Will Espero (D, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point), state Sen. Josh Green (D, Naalehu-Kailua-Kona) and state Sen. Jill Tokuda (D, Kailua-Kaneohe).
State Rep. Kaniela Ing (D, South Maui) plans to announce today his candidacy for an unspecified higher office.
Tsutsui was appointed in 2012 to fill Brian Schatz’s vacancy when Schatz went on to fill the seat of the late U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye. Tsutsui was elected in 2014 and has announced he will not seek re-election.
“I’m glad that voters have an option,” said Iwamoto, daughter of Roberts Hawaii Chairman and CEO Robert Iwamoto Jr.
She said others have had a long history of saying “no can” to the people. Iwamoto vows to be a leader who is “fearless, who will fight for what matters, someone with integrity” and who voters can hold accountable, and who will say, “Can.”
Correction: Former state Judge Dan Foley said Kim Coco Iwamoto would be an advocate for “people who may not have a voice.” An earlier version of this story and in Monday’s print edition misquoted Foley as saying “people who may not have a choice.”
